5 minutes into the metal gear survive beta (i'm seeing just how bad it is) and i'm questiong the game. WHY IS THERE A CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION SECTION AS IN DEPTH AS RPGS???? I'll be editing and adding more as i go along.

1. So it seems to be structured like an rpg/survival game. You have multiple weapon slots and inventory and such you manage at a hub before going anywhere. Armor and such has stats theres abnormal status etc. Definitely not metal gear.

2. For the beta it only allows you to play salvage missions which are basically defend an excavator while it gathers some type of energy. You can set up barricades and traps and such and you can gather things while defending/ between waves. Materials are used to craft things. Weapons, armor, ammo, traps, barricades, etc. Looks your weapons and armor get damaged from use and attacks. So you have to repair them.

3. The counter intuitive controls remind me of the game Lost Planet. Anyone remember that game? I say that because your character movement is clunky. You have to switch weapons using the D-pad and to use a weapon you have to hold the left trigger to pull it out and then use it, if you let go of the left trigger it puts the weapon away. So really way worse. You also have to stop moving to stop sprinting. After you play one salvage mission it gives you new weapons and such to try out.

4. The inventory and equipment menus are awful. Not only is it ugly, it also feels bad. The "tutorial" is put away in a separate menu that you have to read through if you want to. Lots of bullet points and scrolling which again is designed poorly.

5. I already am tired of playing it so i uninstalled it. not even 2 hours of gameplay. smh.

I beat Secret of Mana yesterday. I was a little disappointed with it, mainly due to the poor translation and iffy controls (I played it on the iPhone, which was supposed to have a more accurate translation, but used the SNES translation for the most part). I found the gameplay a little repetitive and boring, too. Most bosses could be killed by spamming Popoiís magic. I didnít grow up playing Secret of Mana, so I didnít have any nostalgia attached to it, which probably helps when playing it today. Oh, well.

Nioh - Back to back battles with Nue and White Tiger have me embracing a new boss strategy: light armor (of which I'm already an adherent) and low stance strong attack. It's basically born out of my lazyness so I didn't have to master White Tiger's limited but quick moveset at a slower dodge/roll and risk getting caught randomly in a fatal combo (happens against Nue too, where one hit won't kill you, but they can immediately follow it up and catch you again or drain your stamia while you uselessly pound dodge) . I could almost be completely reactive (as low stance advertises) and get away with it. The strong attack makes up for the loss of damage (it's not like you're going to overwhelm them quickly anyway) and has the added effect of naturally limiting the length of your combos so you don't get caught being greedy and getting punished for it. You feel pretty invincible with that much freedom of movement, running circles around the boss even in the middle of their attacks, so it was effective and I didn't suffer from the loss of power.

Nioh - Back to back battles with Nue and White Tiger have me embracing a new boss strategy

I haven't picked the game back up since beating Onryoki How are you enjoying it overall, compared to Souls?

Meanwhile, I've still been plugging away at Xenoblade Chronicles 2 about an hour a night (65h currently). No change in opinion: It's still Xeno for kids. The story is just a mess. But boy is it pretty. The music is also (primarily) by Yasunori Mitsuda, the guy behind Chrono Trigger and Xenogears' soundtracks. He said this game was "the biggest and most challenging project I have ever worked on." https://youtu.be/aL91QTdQRrQ?t=3m8s

I haven't picked the game back up since beating Onryoki How are you enjoying it overall, compared to Souls?

It's the best knock off I've played, and does a lot of neat unique twists on things, but it's more repetitive, the equipment variation is kind of a wash on if it adds anything or just doesn't matter (because you're just habitually upgrading to the next weapon or armor of choice with better stats anyway) and the missions give the areas and bosses more of a "wash, rinse, repeat" sort of vibe. You can't get "lost" in it the same way because you can't even jump around once you're in an area. This choice could have positives, like putting you "behind enemy lines" until you get yourself out, but mostly it just gives it the cyclical feel I described.

The fast combat is fun and stances add a lot of variation... except it's more optional variation because you can pretty much mid-stance, roll past, attack, repeat on most enemies, including the big baddies and even some bosses, and never even get hit (mostly, you can't or you're dead =). Here's something I've never had happen in a Souls game: I went into a boss blind and beat them without getting hit once! It wasn't me either, it just happened to be the easiest boss in the game apparently, with a similar moveset as a major enemy you already fight in-level (and the roll-behind, attack strategy is all you need).

To be fair, I've also had a number of them give me just as much or more trouble than a typical Souls boss, getting killed a ton of times in the process, but for varyingly rewarding reasons. It literally is a process, it's a little too much pattern memorization or instant death that feels a bit cheaper than a more balanced approach where you can pick and choose your spots and exchange hits, which in itself leads to less restrictive, more varied and therefore more stimulating combat. I feel like it's much more that there's right and wrong answers in Nioh, and you pretty much need to memorize the "correct answer" to every move to get through (until I said fuck it and went with the ultra speedy/dodgy low stance to cut me some slack). This is a slightly different approach and its merits are debatable; it's kind of fun breaking down and puzzling it out, but sometimes it's a little too much like a meticulous puzzle and not chaotic and improvisational enough, strange as that is to complain about.

Nope, the original version from 1993. I played the crap out of Doom 64 when I was a teenager, but I never played the original. It was awesome!

Oh cool. Yeah, I actually play through Doom once every few years. It's pretty fantastic. The thought and care in level design and enemy placement still makes for a great game. Play through it in zDoom (enhanced graphics and mouseaim) and it's even better than the original.

Oh cool. Yeah, I actually play through Doom once every few years. It's pretty fantastic. The thought and care in level design and enemy placement still makes for a great game. Play through it in zDoom (enhanced graphics and mouseaim) and it's even better than the original.

I'll give that a try someday.

Have you played the most recent version of Doom? If so, what did you think?

The modern one? Yeah, it was fun. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for in a Doom follow-up, but I had weird expectations for what it should actually be.

Tell us more? I thought it was a nice return to form in a modern interpretation, at least as far as the gameplay went (the whole manually initiating big combat sequences was weird). It was definitely a "fun" vibe, which the original Doom had, though one didn't exactly imagine that's what it was all about or trying to convey as best it could in 1993 (Aliens with demons). Maybe that's why the 2016 version was ultimately fleeting; I played it, beat it, deleted it, and didn't think much more of it. Would you have preferred something with an atmosphere more like Doom 3 with the Doom 2016 engine or at least more speed? That one was like they were trying to make something more realistic or at cinematic, and different, but it missed the mark on what people really enjoyed about those games, wheras '16 was more an attempt at a literal modern remake (Pinkys are back in their original form!). A combination of the approaches from Doom 3 and '16 would be interesting, as it stands they're like two sides of the original coin.

Tell us more? I thought it was a nice return to form in a modern interpretation, at least as far as the gameplay went (the whole manually initiating big combat sequences was weird). It was definitely a "fun" vibe, which the original Doom had, though one didn't exactly imagine that's what it was all about or trying to convey as best it could in 1993 (Aliens with demons). Maybe that's why the 2016 version was ultimately fleeting; I played it, beat it, deleted it, and didn't think much more of it. Would you have preferred something with an atmosphere more like Doom 3 with the Doom 2016 engine or at least more speed?

I think they successfully made Doom relevant again, which is a huge feat. It's just not the successor I was hoping for. And honestly, I don't even know how to explain what I want. I suppose I wanted something crazy, like a direct evolution of what Doom 1-2 were, not a full-scale reboot. Something that was faster, more enemies on screen, more care into enemy placement, weapon spawns, etc. Imagine '90s Doom + Super Meat Boy, with levels that could be played (and replayed) quickly and mastered over time. What we got with Doom 2016 was a bit too cinematic and linear for me, the forced melee stuff fell flat, and the whole experience didn't really hold my attention longer than it took to beat it.

I'd say I'm a pretty big DooM fan (as my snooty writing of the name shows) and I was happily surprised by the 2016 edition. It wasn't a landmark game like DooM 1+2 were, but I doubt that's even possible in this day and age. It brought me the same joy Zelda: A Link Between Worlds did. Meanwhile, I never even finished DooM 3...

I think they successfully made Doom relevant again, which is a huge feat. It's just not the successor I was hoping for. And honestly, I don't even know how to explain what I want. I suppose I wanted something crazy, like a direct evolution of what Doom 1-2 were, not a full-scale reboot. Something that was faster, more enemies on screen, more care into enemy placement, weapon spawns, etc. Imagine '90s Doom + Super Meat Boy, with levels that could be played (and replayed) quickly and mastered over time. What we got with Doom 2016 was a bit too cinematic and linear for me, the forced melee stuff fell flat, and the whole experience didn't really hold my attention longer than it took to beat it.

I'd say I'm a pretty big DooM fan (as my snooty writing of the name shows) and I was happily surprised by the 2016 edition. It wasn't a landmark game like DooM 1+2 were, but I doubt that's even possible in this day and age.

Sounds like that's what Wally was looking for, and I don't think it's impossible (it did get credit for mixing it up with the melee/survivability tradeoffs that rewarded aggression), just not very likely in any given case. Continuing your comparison with Zelda, a series with many more entries than Doom, look at how many games of varying experimentation they relased since 1998 before making BotW, and these are the best, most-consistent game developers in history trying their hardest to hit a grand slam on cue.

This is easier to pull off, and I'm not saying easy as a slight, because it's also easy to screw up or misunderstand exactly what made something fun, so pulling it off as well as ALBW and Doom 16 is admirable, but it's much harder to create a successor that's equally fun and engaging that's also a unique and transcendent reinvention of the form in and of itself, from scratch. Practically impossible as you say because what could make it transcendent could also make it unrecognizable from its predecessors, "We don't want to make it too different from what people want/expect." So, many times it's too different or not enough, thus why the ALBW method is more effective since you're basically swinging into that familiarity the best you can while making it feel freshly modern.

You are plowing through these pretty fast, but what a backlog! I've pretty much given up on playing classics I missed from too long ago. No matter how transcendentally good they may be, it's just not a fair representation at a certain point. As in, there's no way for me to truly experience the impact on a gut level.

This is easier to pull off, and I'm not saying easy as a slight, because it's also easy to screw up or misunderstand exactly what made something fun, so pulling it off as well as ALBW and Doom 16 is admirable, but it's much harder to create a successor that's equally fun and engaging that's also a unique and transcendent reinvention of the form in and of itself, from scratch. Practically impossible as you say because what could make it transcendent could also make it unrecognizable from its predecessors, "We don't want to make it too different from what people want/expect." So, many times it's too different or not enough, thus why the ALBW method is more effective since you're basically swinging into that familiarity the best you can while making it feel freshly modern.

You are plowing through these pretty fast, but what a backlog! I've pretty much given up on playing classics I missed from too long ago. No matter how transcendentally good they may be, it's just not a fair representation at a certain point. As in, there's no way for me to truly experience the impact on a gut level.

Thatís certainly true for the game I tried to play between Doom and Super Metroid: The Elder Scrolls: Arena. It was just too out-of-date to the point it wasnít fun to play. Iíve enjoyed almost all the games Iíve played so far, though, and Iím excited to keep going. Itís been so much fun.

Continuing your comparison with Zelda, a series with many more entries than Doom, look at how many games of varying experimentation they relased since 1998 before making BotW, and these are the best, most-consistent game developers in history trying their hardest to hit a grand slam on cue.

Sure, and you could see Id has spawned other landmark evolutions of the FPS genre, like Quake. But they've also failed a few times, which is why to be honest I was surprised that Doom 2016 was as good as it was. It could have very well been another dud. Whereas with the Zelda series, the duds are rare and usually unexpected.